Visual Basic

More useful things

This tutorial describes the coding conventions we used in preparing most of the source code for these tutorials. These conventions are based on extracts from our in-house TMS Visual Basic programmer's manual, VB Vogue (also included as part of the TMS Developer's Framework).

You can use pages purely to look up type or scope prefixes you don't understand, but you might also want to use our conventions in your own code. Or you might decide to adapt them to suit your own preferences. The important thing is that you have coding conventions and that you apply them uniformly across your code.

The Need For Coding Conventions

Consistently applied coding standards can improve the following in a software project:

  • Productivity. Productivity, as applied here to the actual writing of code, means saving "code time" without suffering some inherent quality penalty.
  • Quality. The quality of code is chiefly measured by its relative conformance to some technical specification and the ease with which it can be maintained.
  • Maintainability. Maintainable code is both repairable and extensible. Additionally, and in all cases, maintainable code is easy to comprehend, which facilitates achieving speedy, accurate modification.
  • Comprehensibility. Comprehensible code is both conformant (with some recognized standard) and consistent.